staff:

Introducing the new Tumblr Directory

We’ve been really inspired by the work of Kevin Rose and his team on their new self-organizing Twitter directory, WeFollow.  The premise is simple: Everyone picks up to three tags to describe themselves, and the directory ranks everyone within each tag by their “follower” counts.

The result is an entirely community-organized directory.  The problem is follower counts are a boring way to sort people, and rarely let anyone new surface for the community to discover.  Which is why we just launched our new Tumblarity stat to quickly bubble-up blogs that are gaining momentum.

So here’s how the new Directory works: If your blog focuses on a particular subject, you can tag it.  Blogs are then sorted within each tag by their current tumblarity.

Testing the Directory for the last couple weeks (using some rough filters), we’ve found thousands of interesting blogs we had no idea existed.  And the constantly moving tumblarity ranks mean new people are always surfacing.

Please note:  We’re leaving this feature in beta until next week.  Until then, you can only pick two tags out of our pre-defined list.  Afterwards, you’ll be able to use any three tags you define.

Between reblogging, search, Popular Stuff, the Map, and the new Directory, we’re pretty happy with all of the ways to explore and discover interesting people on Tumblr.